The usual Open Thread rules apply: be concise, be charitable and, above all, be amusing!
PopeWatch: Open Thread
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
My three sons graduated from an elite Catholic, conservative HS.
Over the 12 years they were there, a number of young men entered the teaching order running the school. My boys’ reactions were they didn’t want to face the outside world or didn’t have anything better to do with their lives.
Of course, that is a bad reflection on me.
Over my life, I’ve encountered a number of priests that had entered vocations later in life after successful civilian careers – bankers, attorneys, retired military. Years ago, the WSJ did an article [worth a year’s subscription price] on an older, successful widowed Catholic man who entered the priesthood late in life.
While we’re at it, COVID data, 7 day moving averages.
Global: death toll for 6 April, 3,455, the lowest recorded since 30 March 2020. The post-omicron wave appears to have hit a crest and had no effect on the death counts.
U.S.: Case counts appear to have declined to a constant of about 28,000 infections identified per day. Given the case fatality rate this winter (0.0056), this suggests we may see a decline in the death count to about 155 per day in about five weeks time.
Death count is currently 470 per day. It was lower during the period running from 31 May 2021 to 31 July 2021, but not any other time since 30 March 2020.
ICU census is currently 1,770. This datum has been collected for the U.S. by Our World in Data since 16 July 2020. This is the lowest value yet recorded. Prior to 15 March 2022, this number had never fallen below 3,500.
One puzzle: the case fatality rate in the U.S. during the omicron wave has been 3x that in Britain. On a denominator of the whole population, mortality from COVID this season in Britain has been just north of 30 per 100,000, v. north of 60 per 100,000 in the U.S. Mortality from seasonal flu in the U.S. varies a great deal, but bounces around 10 per 100,000.
Something trivial which made me laugh this week:
My daughter attends a Bible talk called “Teens” on a Wednesday evening at the local Maronite Parish (she tells me she wants to connect with her Lebanese roots and some of her school friends go). Its quite good as they analyse the gospel and the organisers make it relatable and fun, but keep the serious content. It’s run by a father-of-four whose daughters are friends with my girls. So one of his daughters tells my daughter her father is annoyed with Father C, the Parish Priest. Why? Because Father C keeps ringing him up and asking him- can you pick up this for me from the other Parish? Can you buy 20kg of meat for the Parish Bbq on Sunday. Can you run by the store and buy 5cases of drink…Can you organise so and so. So the father-of-four says to Father C- “Father C I can’t drop everything every time and do so and so for you, I’m busy I have my work, and my children and a wife.”
Father C says to him, “I’m busy too. I don’t have time”
“ What are you busy with Father C?”
Father C doesn’t have an answer. Father C trying to take advantage of a parishioner, father-of-four, whose been generous with his time.
And it’s this back and forth…it’s quite amusing.
Father C needs a PA by the sounds of it. And a reality check.
“One puzzle: the case fatality rate in the U.S. during the omicron wave has been 3x that in Britain.”
I know a lot of Americans who had the little o and didn’t report it. There was no reason to. Maybe more people with minor cases are reporting in the UK?
“For the life of me I can’t understand….”
-priests who choose a life of celibacy and despise Humanae Vitae because of the periodic abstinence involved with NFP.
https://pjmedia.com/columns/paula-bolyard/2022/04/08/psychosis-of-flawed-morality-9-year-old-ohio-boy-denied-kidney-transplant-because-father-is-unvaccinated-n1587991
Did you catch this? What do you suppose is the actual motive for the Cleveland Clinic’s policy?
Punishment and coercion. We are finding a lot of warped people among the medicos.
There was a woman in Rochester who asked doctors to try ivermectin on her dying husband. They had no better alternatives. She tried to get a court order, but her husband died before she could get one.
This business at the Cleveland Clinic is just insane. The vaccines do not improve your prospects with the later variants, they’re not sterilizing, and the father’s already had COVID. The surgeon, the nephrologist, and the pediatrician or GP looking after this youth ought to be stomping their feet in rage at the hospital administration.